SDN-based energy management scheme for sustainability of data centers: An analysis on renewable energy sources and electric vehicles participation

Energy management is becoming one of the major issues from last many years due to an exponential increase in the smart device users for accessing various services from the geo-distributed cloud data centers (DCs) using Internet. During this time, there is an emergence of new technology called as cloud computing which provides on-demand pay-per-use services such as storage, computation, and network to the end users. These services are provided to the end users by various geographically located DCs which are hosted by different service providers such as-Microsoft, Amazon, IBM etc. With an increase in dependence of end users, DCs have expanded both in size and number. With such an expansion, these DCs consume huge amount of energy to accomplish their routine tasks. Such an increase in energy consumption generates a lot of load on the power grid. Moreover, the carbon emissions from these DCs has a global impact on the environment. To mitigate these issues, the integration of DCs with renewable energy sources (RES) can be helpful to reduce the carbon emissions and to ease the load on the power grid. For this purpose, a SDN-based energy management scheme for sustainability of DCs using RES is proposed in this paper.1 To achieve the aforementioned objectives, an energy-efficient flow scheduling algorithm is proposed using SDN. Moreover, a charging-discharging scheme for penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) is also presented to manage the intermittency of renewable energy. An energy trading and reward point scheme is designed to attract the EVs to participate in the proposed energy management scheme. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is proved using realistic weather traces. The results obtained clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme for sustainability of DCs.